King George Tupou V of Tonga, who introduced democracy to the South Pacific archipelago after riots following his ascension in 2006, died in a Hong Kong hospital on Sunday, the Tongan government said on Monday.

He was 63. Tupou V's younger brother and the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Tupouto'a Lavaka, was with him when he died while on a visit to Hong Kong. A government statement confirming his death was read on local radio.

The New Zealand government, a major aid donor to Tonga, said he would be remembered for ushering in significant political change.

"He believed that the monarchy was an instrument of change and can truly be seen as the architect of evolving democracy in Tonga. This will be his enduring legacy," said Prime Minister John Key in a statement.

Shortly after Tupou V ascended the throne in 2006, demonstrations demanding greater democracy turned into riots in which eight people died and large parts of the commercial centre of the capital, Nuku'alofa, were destroyed.

The Oxford-educated king then said he would relinquish most of his power in the last Polynesian monarchy to a broadly popularly elected government after 165 years of feudal rule.

In response to the February 25th killing of two US soldiers by an unidentified Afghan, who was angered by the most recent "Koran burning" episode by the always sensitive US army, the Commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, told US troops:

"There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss. There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is not the time for vengeance, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are."

This little detail, as motive, seems to have been 'forgotten' by the mainstream media in their coverage of the recent massacre of 16 Afghan villagers by up to 20 drunken US soldiers. Indeed, the reports that up to 20 'drunken' troops were involved in the massacre have also been conveniently ignored by the Western media, who have chosen to go with the US military-provided "lone crazed assassin" lie that has served so well to cover up previous planned murders by US forces of Empire. The fact of the matter is, General Allen knew that his troops were planning 'revenge', but obviously could do nothing to stop it.

On Monday, the settlement between five major banks and the federal and state governments of foreclosure-related fraud charges was filed in federal district court in Washington, DC. The agreement must be approved by the court to take effect.

The settlement, reported to be worth $25 billion, was announced February 9 and hailed by President Obama as a serious rebuke to the banks and boon to distressed homeowners. (See: "Obama administration brokers pro-bank mortgage fraud settlement").

It is nothing of the kind. It quashes investigations by 49 state attorneys general into wholesale fraud and illegality committed by the five biggest mortgage servicers in their rush to foreclose on homeowners and seize their houses. The abuses first surfaced in the fall of 2010, amid reports of "robo-signing" of foreclosure papers and court submissions.

It was revealed that bank employees and contractors routinely vouched for the accuracy of documents affirming the banks' title to targeted homes without having ascertained the facts or having even read the documents they were signing. The process was rife with forgeries, fraudulent notarizations, inflated job descriptions of the signers and other violations of the law.

A new feature story in this month's Wired blows the lid off plans for a massive new National Security Agency data center in Utah that represents the resurrection of a program that Congress killed in 2003, known as "Total Information Awareness," targeting literally all electronic communications all over the world - including those made by American citizens.

The proposal was to build computing systems that could suck up every electronic communication on the planet and filter them through a smart super-computer that would flag certain conversations, emails, transactions and other items of interest for further review. It was a program so monstrous in scope that after a brief legislative battle, Congress imposed strict regulations on the type of technology that could accomplish those ends, prohibiting it from ever being used against Americans.

But if well sourced intelligence reporter James Bamford is to be believed, as of this year, their efforts to stop it are moot.

According to Bamford, the NSA's new data center in Utah will be the most all-encompassing spy machine ever conceived, capable of breaking almost any encryption, reading any email and recording any phone call anywhere in the world, even if it's not made over the Internet. A network of ultra-sensitive satellites enhance the center's intelligence-finding capabilities with the unique ability to sniff electronic communications from a massive distance.

Led by Boxer and DeFazio, Bicameral Letter Calls for Reversal of Two Decade-Old Labeling Policy, Supports CFS Legal Petition

In Only 6 Months, Already 850,000+ Public Comments To FDA In Support Of Labeling

This morning a bicameral letter signed by 55 Members of Congress was sent to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg calling on the agency to require the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods. The bicameral, bipartisan letter led by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) was written in support of a legal petition filed by the Center for Food Safety (CFS) on behalf of the Just Label It campaign and its nearly 400 partner organizations and businesses; many health, consumer, environmental, and farming organizations, as well as food companies, are also signatories. Since CFS filed the labeling petition in October 2011, the public has submitted over 850,000 comments in support of labeling.

China, the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, will take steps to prevent European trade sanctions disrupting shipments from the Persian Gulf nation, said tanker operator China Shipping Development Co.

The government has discussed ways of helping shipping companies get insurance once sanctions against Iran kick in on July 1, General Manager Yan Zhichong told reporters in Hong Kong today. The ministry of transport and National Development Reform Commission has had special meetings on the issue, he said.

While questions remain about the existence of a single global elite with an agenda that goes beyond simply keeping itself very, very rich, there are certainly groups that want to run the world for quite other reasons. And with the increasing globalisation of political and economic institutions, it has become easier for a relatively small group to inveigle itself into quite staggeringly influential positions. One cabal in particular reveals - alarmingly - what a small group, driven by a fanatical belief system, can achieve from the shadows. And writing as we are in the United Kingdom, this group is on our doorstep, and has been for over a century. And although perhaps small in number, its reach is big.

Our research into this subject - detailed in The Stargate Conspiracy (1999) and The Sion Revelation (2006) - demonstrated that every major step in the development of the European Union from a simple trading body to a borderline superstate can be traced back to a very specific ideology, which upholds rule by an elite from behind the scenes. But this isn't just about politics. Astonishingly, this ideology is also about mysticism and magic.

This shadowy politico-occult movement is synarchy, which was developed by the Frenchman Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves, the Marquis d'Alveydre, in opposition to the rise of anarchy in the second half of the nineteenth century. To him the ideal synarchist state would be a rigid social hierarchy topped by an elite that is predestined to rule - absolutely at odds with the then emerging concepts of democracy, individual liberty and social mobility.

Central to Saint-Yves was the creation of a united Europe, a call for which appears on the first page of his first book on synarchy, Keys to the East (1877). He believed that his perfectly balanced society reflected deep cosmic laws, with which his elite perfectly resonated. They are also directly guided by the powers that rule the universe - as he believed himself to be.

Fort Mead, Maryland - An attorney for an Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of pages of classified information asked a military judge Thursday to dismiss the charges, arguing the government bungled the handover of documents to the defense.

The request came during a hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning at a military courtroom at Fort Meade, Md., near Baltimore. Military prosecutors say Manning, a 24-year-old Oklahoma native, downloaded and sent to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks a vast store of sensitive documents and diplomatic cables. The military says Manning indirectly aided al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula by giving information to the WikiLeaks site.

Banks might be indulging a bad habit that could be worsening the foreclosure crisis, according to recent research from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

The economists, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Stephan Whitaker, did some analysis of the Ohio real estate market and found a disquieting trend. Banks seem to be over-valuing many of the homes they foreclose on, making it less likely that homeowners can get a loan modification and more likely that they'll end up losing their property.

It is not clear how or why banks are getting an inflated idea of the value of so many properties - especially since foreclosed homes tend to drag down real estate prices for the whole neighborhood - but the trend seems to be real. Fitzpatrick and Whitaker note that at foreclosed-home auctions in the Cleveland area, banks routinely sell their properties for much less than what they paid to buy them from the sheriff, meaning banks are high-balling their estimates of what those homes are worth.

Building a skyscraper is the ultimate expression of economic confidence, and more than half of the 124 skyscrapers currently under construction in the world are being built in China. But confidence is often based on nothing more than faith, hope, and cheap credit, and a frenzy of skyscraper-building is also the most reliable historical indicator of an impending financial crash.

The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, the twin symbols of New York's emergence as the world's financial capital, were started at the end of the "Roaring Twenties" but completed in the depths of the Great Depression. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia were built just before the Asian financial crash of 1998. Burj al-Khalifa in Dubai, now the world's tallest building, was just starting construction when the Great Recession hit in 2008.